California Gold by John Jakes (review)

Reviews 371 widowers. They fall in love (or are lonely), marry (or don’t), bear children (or have none), suffer—and some die. They all possess an elegant simplicity. Almost all the stories exhibit a careful structural unity. “The Convergence of Gerda” begins with Gerda arranging her hair in a coil; as it ends, Gerda jumps from the window of her rented flat and her body rolls “into the arms of the air, and kind darkness wrapped itself around her.” In “The Spacious World of Aunt Louise” we first see the heroine gazing into the “dark well” of her garbage can. At the end she leans against her disappointing inheritance, a vase “as deep as a well.” Other stories show this same tight patterning. Ms. Ghiselin’sstyle succeeds best in the descriptive mode. In the first story, “Signora Grigia,” the narrator shows us the Italian town of Amalfi, a wonder­ ful blend of paradise and inferno. “She walked up the steep streets past arched alleys that smelled of urine, looking at doorways decorated with old scrolls and flowers, at the remains of palaces with shields on their faces, at a facade with octopi, and centaurs, and the lusty head of a satyr.” The author’s evocations of the western wilderness please as well. In “Mary Manfield’s Garden” we see “. . . an amazement of wild flowers, poppies and paint brushes and mallows, wild lilac and nightshade, cactus blossoms of red and gold and purples, white phlox and sisyrinchium as blue as the autumn sea.” This lyrical description operates as an ironic objective correlative to the humans who intrude into Mary’s prelapsarian world. Ms. Ghiselin does not presume to explain why we must feel joy and pain. Instead, she lets us experience those feelings along with her characters and in so doing adds another dimension to our lives. SUSAN E. GUNTER Westminster College California Gold. ByJohn Jakes. (New York: Random House, 1989. 658 pages, $19.95.) Willing women are only one of the seductive forces Mack Chance encoun­ ters in John Jakes’s new historical novel, California Gold. Even more alluring, if possible, are the opportunities to make his fortune in oil, oranges, real estate, and silent pictures. Lured by a promotional guidebook, in 1886 Chance, a penniless eighteen-year-old with an unlikely surname, makes his way from Pennsylvania to California. Encountering a host of historical characters includ­ ing William Randolph Hearst arid Jack London, he matches his fists and then his wits against the harbor rats, roughnecks, land barons, and railroad tycoons who stand in the way of his ambitions. By 1910 Chance is a rich man, having overcome his enemies and survived business reversals, a failed marriage, the disappearance of his only son, and the destruction of his Nob Hill mansion in the San Francisco earthquake. The strength of California Gold is Jakes’s thorough investigation in pri­ mary and secondary materials, including the works of the contemporary writer 372 Western American Literature Kevin Starr. Jakes, who makes his home on the East Coast, also traveled west to complete his research. Despite his efforts, his story lacks believability. The dramatic episodes are contrived and the dialogue is stilted. The literary device of linking Mack and Carla’s fevered physical attraction with the hot santan winds is unintentionally silly. California Gold suffers from the weakness of characterization that is com­ mon in popular historical novels. Perhaps the one exception is the protagonist’s first wife, Carla Heilman, who is transformed in the course of the novel from a sensual woman into a blowzy drunk. California is, of course, the main subject of the book. It is the Promised Land of abundant beauty and resources that invites exploitation. Environ­ mentalist themes dominate the story and even John Muir makes a brief appear­ ance. Unfortunately, Jakes lacks the authentic voice of a western writer, and the novel fails to project the reality of the California landscape and its inhab­ itants. In the Afterword Jakes confesses his “sadness in looking at present-day California.” He finds it “the exemplar of the quintessential American ruin.” The prominent use of violence together with the author’s pessimistic attitude create a contradiction between the text...